Circling
by linneholm
Summary: Allison Baty Ryan is a 26-year-old female of the human species. Her life is ordinary. Well not completely, you see, Allison has this power. A power that only one man in the world can resist, but will she ever find out who he is? She doesn't know that the one man is out there, and there isn't a chance of her meeting him ever. Until she meets the alien to change her life. The Doctor.
1. Chapter 1

**Circling**

**Chapter 1**

_A Trip Down Memory Lane_

I looked out the open door, startled at what I had seen. I had traveled through time and space. It was marvelous. Just marvelous. I could go anywhere, in every period of time. All with this man, this wonderful, wonderful man. He was wearing odd clothes, though. As if he was from another time. Well I guess he was, actually. But I didn't think about it at that time, because I was in a time machine, which was still amazing.

"What do you think?" He asked, standing next to me.

"We are on another planet. In the year 12059. You are an alien. You have two hearts. And you look human but you're not you're an alien with two hearts I mean who has two-DON'T TOUCH ME." I finished the sentence with a shriek, as the Doctor was about to pad me on my uncovered shoulder.

"Sorry, I forgot. We're just stopping to pick up a friend of mine, it won't be long. Wait here, please?" He asked, and I nodded, sitting down. He left the TARDIS in my hands, which was weird since he knew that I knew how to control it, and we had only known each other for a mere 7 hours. I take it he trusted me. Or just did not believe me. But it was incredible, it really was. The TARDIS, The Doctor, everything. This technology, that I now knew, but didn't quite understand. This astonishing, mind blowing, absolutely fantastic bigger-on-the-inside time machine, it couldn't be real, it just couldn't be!

"It's real, and you know it, Al." I murmured to myself. "You know it. The pool, the library, the male wardrobe, music collection, the female wardrobe, anything you've seen on this ship, and also the regenerating man with two hearts and his friend, who is.. Oh hi!" I said, when I noticed that the Doctor had returned with his friend.

"Hello, I'm-" He started, but I cut him off. "Captain Jack Harkness, I am aware. It is nice to meet you." I said, smiling at him, but making no effort to approach him. He reached out his hand to shake mine, but I just promptly shook my head no.

"Sorry, I don't touch people." I shrugged. He raised an eyebrow, looking quite intrigued.

"And may I ask how you know who I am?" He asked, and I glanced at the Doctor for help, since I had no idea what to say.

"Oh, all the many stories I've told of you, of course!" He said, as I was about to open my mouth to say something not very similar. He stepped forward and smiled. "So, Jack, Allison, Allison, Jack. Greetings!" He smiled, and went to start up the TARDIS again.

Jack and I sat down, and started talking while the Doctor was controlling the TARDIS.

"Are you from earth, or?" He began, while he was following the Doctor with his eyes.

"Yes I am. I was born in nineteen sixty eight. You sound American.. Uh, when are you from?" I asked, sort of precarious of that last question.

"I'm from the golden age of the Time Agency. Do you know what that is?"

"I, um, I've heard of it." But I knew. I knew precisely as much as the Doctor did, nothing more, and nothing less. But I did get a headache when I thought about it, so I was trying to sort it all out in a slow process. But yes, I knew about the Time Agency. It was strange to talk to him when he didn't know about my thing. I mean, not that kind of _thing. _But I had this huge thing that was circling around me, never out of my mind. I kind of zoned out at that point, I guess. I do that a lot. My mind wanders to some memory that is not mine, memories that I have stolen, memories that I have unwillingly copied from other people. Some of them being complete strangers. Incidentally, I also remember thinking about Jack. I liked him. He did not question me when I said that I did not touch people, he just nodded and took a small step backwards. He respected me for not wanting to touch him, and not many people are like that. The conversation ended there as I recall. The following thing I remember is the Doctor asking me where I would like to go now.

"Oh I don't know.. I've never really given much thought into that sort of thing." I said, looking at the Doctor.

"Well, you should start doing that, cause he's been practically everywhere so it doesn't matter to him. What would you like to see?" I could hear Jack saying, but I was still looking at the Doctor. My eyes moved to look at the control panel, and I started thinking of people I would want to meet.

Let us see.. It would be interesting to meet someone historically famous like Amelia Earheart or Abraham Lincoln, but getting to rock out with legends like Freddie Mercury or John Lennon would also be amazing.. I guessed that I was not allowed to change time, so doing things like talking Kurt Cobain out of suicide or taking a bullet for President John F Kennedy were out of the question. This was a hard one..

"I have no idea, my mind is being a fucktard right now." I said, and let out a yawn.

"Sorry about that. I don't know. Why don't you use that thing that sees those extraterrestrial signals so we can go save the world?" I asked, but did not take precaution to the word 'fucktard', so they just kind of let out a laugh at that one.

"Pardon my french.." I mumbled, but smiled a little when I noticed that Jack had his eyes locked on me.

"Yes we can do that, since your mind is being a.. fucktard." The Doctor said with a small grin.

So the Doctor looked at some screens, and the TARDIS picked up a signal from an alien ship in the 1960's on a pirate radio. This should be interesting, I thought. Having seen the movie_ 'The Boat That Rocked'_, and loving rock from the sixties, I was kind of looking forward to it, actually.

"The thing is, I have met the Beatles, and they always loved listening to pirate radios. And I haven't seen this sort of spaceship before, but maybe they want good. They probably picked up the radio waves and thought it fun to take a look. Just like us, actually, except we picked up their signal, not the radio signal, which is actually logical but not the point here."

"You have met the Beatles?" I asked. I was stunned.

"Yes, several times, but never in this body." He smiled, and pulled some handles. Jack was quiet, just watching me. It was sort of weird, only I guess I did not really mind, although I was not used to men looking at me at all, and especially not the way he looked at me, but it was quite nice getting attention. I mean, if it were positive attention. Thinking of it, Jack was rather handsome. Brown, thick hair. The way the light affected it, it looked a tad gleaming, and when he smiled, you could see the dimples in his cheeks. His eyes were a beautiful blue colour, lighting up along with his smile. I was happy that I hadn't touched him yet, because if I had, I probably wouldn't look at him that way. Incidentally, if I had touched him, he would not look at me that way, either.

I guess it is all a bit confusing to anyone reading this.. If there are any. You see, other than having OCD, I have this _thing, _as I have mentioned previously. Some might call it a gift, some might call it a superpower, but it is both that and a curse. Mostly the last. Whenever I have bodily contact with a living creature(or living objects such as the TARDIS), I can see everything physically about them. Everything their eyes have ever seen. Everything their body has ever done. Everything they have done, I can see. Every step they have taken, every person they have met. I can hear everything they have ever heard, and see everything from their perspective, but I can not feel what they feel, not physical nor psychological pain. I can not read their mind. Everything they have ever physically seen, done, smelled or heard I can see, smell, and hear. It started around my early teen years, when my body was evolving. Those were also the years I started developing my OCD. But it's impossible to understand if you don't live it. It's such a blessing at some points, but such a curse. The first time I met the Doctor, he touched me for a bare second, and I fainted almost immediately because of all the thing's he'd lived and done and all his bodies and.. I get headaches just from remembering it now. I will explain it to you in a right way, I promise, but my thoughts are too over the place right now. Getting back to what I was telling you about, I was happy that I hadn't touched Jack at the time, because then everything would be different. I probably would have fainted again, knowing about his life and death thing from the Doctor's memories, but it didn't matter, because he just accepted that I don't touch people. I had tried to control it, and with one guy, I practiced. Apparently I can only control it if I really seriously freaking trust this person, I can do it. I can keep it out of my head, and just plainly look at the person in the presence instead of the person's past.

When I first met the Doctor, we were at the school I worked at. Madelyn's School for Talented Youth. I was a secretary. I was staying there overnight, because my roommate had his boyfriend visiting, and they are always loud. Sometimes fighting, sometimes other things. And yes, those kinds of things. Anyway, I was sleeping on the sofa in the office, when I heard this sound. The TARDIS sound. Of course I wasn't aware that it was the TARDIS sound at the time, so I thought it to be a bit strange. It was in the middle of the night, and I got up to find out what had caused this sound. The school had a strange essence to it, which I also noticed. I got up, and walked out of the office towards the sound, but did not reach it before it stopped. Suddenly I was standing in the middle of a dark hallway in my pajamas, and a man was running towards me. "RUN!" he screamed, and I ran after him as fast as I could, because I didn't want to risk whatever he was running from. Running a few stories up, he suddenly stopped and turned around.

"What are we running from?" I asked, and he looked at me.

"We are running from a bunch of killer robots sent from Mars, do I know you?"

"I suppose not, I can't remember having seen you before. Why did we stop running?"

"The robots have stopped moving, they are confused as to where I am because I am with a human."

"So you are not human, then?" I asked with a raised eyebrow. As if I believed that story.

"No." He promptly answered, without any form of hesitation. Did he think I was an imbecile?

"Who are you, then?"

"I'm the Doctor." He replied. Simple as that. The Doctor. Not Dr. Acula, or Dr. Love. Not Dr. Feelgood, or anything else equally stupid. Just the Doctor. But I couldn't resist the question on my tongue.

"Doctor Who?" I inquired, as I stepped a little closer to him. I was getting cold, because the school wasn't heated at night.

"Just the Doctor. Are you the only one here?" He said, whilst he was pulling something out from his inner pocket that looked like some sort of glowy screwdriver, he then pressed a button the made a sound and started pointing his glowy screwdriver thingy at the walls, as if he were scanning them or something like that. I followed his movements carefully, examining him with my eyes, literally forgetting that he asked me the question because I was so curious of this person standing before me.

"I guess you are, then. What are you even doing here?" He asked, still scanning the walls, but now he proceeded to doing the floor as well.

"I work here."

"Right now?"

"No, not right now, obviously. I'm sleeping here. Or, I was, until you came. Where did you come from?"

"Same place the robots came from. Mars. I mean, I am not from Mars originally but right now that's where I've been." As he spoke those words, he stood up in full figure, facing me.

"So you took them with you?"

"You could say. They were following me. We need to go, come on. Allonsy." He added, and then started running again, this time down the stairs.

"We need to get to the TARDIS, in there we'll be safe until I figure out what to do!" He yelled to me, running a couple of meters in front of me.

"What's a TARDIS?" I asked while still following him.

"Time And Relative Dimension In Space." The Doctor quickly replied, and got out a key from his inner pocket. That was the exact moment I knew, that he was telling me the truth, because behind us I could hear whole bunch of gibberish, and the Doctor started talking the same language, yelling at the robots that were approaching us quickly. I was starting to get scared, when we apparently reached the TARDIS, in the basement. It was a small blue phone booth, that had the words "POLICE BOX" written on them. Never in my life had I seen one before, but I didn't have time to wonder about it, because the Doctor hurried up with the lock of the door, and we went inside. I almost did not have time to think about how in the world that thing would keep us from killer robots and how we were going to fit inside it, when I stumbled into a room quite possibly bigger than the whole private school we were in.

It was bigger on the inside.

"What is this place?" I shouted, when I had sat on the floor after falling over a couple of steps.

"This is the TARDIS," the Doctor replied. "It is my time machine. Or space ship. It can travel through time and space. What did you say your name was?"

"I didn't. What are we going to do about those robots?"

"I will figure it out." He looked at me, but it was actually more of a stare. Like he was trying to solve some sort of equation, and I was the answer, yet he did not know what the question was.

"Something isn't right.." He mumbled to himself, whilst still having his eyes rest on me.

"What, you think I don't hear you? I know something isn't right, there are killer robots from mars outside that door!" I looked at him with a nettled look.

"No, with you. You're giving them a strange signal, what is it?" He walked towards me, and I jumped a bit. I didn't want him to touch me. I never wanted anyone to touch me.

"Don't to-" But it was too late, his brain hadn't registered my started sentence, and he had touched my face, just for a second, but that second had a thousand years in it. It felt as if I'd been struck by lightning, and in the second his hand brushed my cheek, I could see everything, ever. But it was so much more than normally. This person wasn't human. He has had ten bodies, and my brain just couldn't keep track. Is was too much. I could see, hear, and smell everything. The tears and Rose and Martha and Donna and Sarah Jane and Captain Jack and Mickey and all the bodies and the regenerations and the time traveling and the being tortured and all the losses he had suffered and it was too much, not a single part of my body could hold that sort of energy. I fainted. I had been on this mind wrecking dangerous undertaking through his life, and it all happened in less than a second.


	2. Chapter 2

**Chapter 2**

_Depth Of The Doctor_

The next thing I remember is waking up on a warn bed, still inside the TARDIS, but the Doctor was nowhere to be seen. I sat up, trying to remember what I had just seen. I closed my eyes because the light was hurting my head. It felt as if I was too hungover for words, but I knew that it was just the Doctor's memories I had captured. I couldn't get it out of my head. All his suffering. His whole race dying. The companions, all of them. They were all marvelous, and they were all gone. He was so alone, too alone. I knew right there that I could never forget about it. How lonely he was. How broken he was. How all he wanted was to fix things, but sometimes things could not be fixed. It was so hard. I couldn't get it out of my head, even if I was trying, which I really was. I wanted to go back out there and help him fight the robots, because I suspected that that was what he was doing, but it was so hard. I was unable to even stand up. My body started shaking. I had no control over it, I could just sit there and let it happen while I relived all the Doctor's memories right up until he touched me. It was horrifying, most of it. He did have some happy memories, too. He had children. He had this huge family, but then everything was painful. The Time War started, and everyone died, but not the Doctor. He was all alone for so long, before he met anyone. And that someone is gone, along with all the others. That is what was circling my mind. He was so alone, and even when he wasn't, he still was. He had this long life, and he had devoted it to helping others, and he was so amazing and I knew at that moment that my life would never be the same. That I could not leave him when this was over. Unless he wanted me to, which he probably did._ Yeah_, I thought, _he probably doesn't want a fainting 26-year-old around all the time. I'd just ruin everything. But he's so alone.._

I lay down again, still shaking, and I could feel the tears. My body had never had to hold all these memories, and my feelings were too much. Even though I was making so hard an effort to not do it, I broke down. I started crying hysterically, trying not to, but it only made it worse. Every time I closed my eyes, I could see all his hurt. Every time I opened them, the tears came streaming down my face. It was too much for me. He hated himself so much. He thought he was a monster. It was breaking my heart. I was slowly beginning to understand that he would always be alone. At some point, they would always leave. Obviously not always by their own will, but he would always keep hurting. He was the strongest man in the universe, by my accounts. He saw people leaving and tried to accept it. He just wanted everything to be better.

The Time War changed him, as any war changes any soldier. He fought, not on the side of the Daleks or the Time Lords, but on the side of the rest of the universe, the one side nobody else wants to take, and in the process, he lost everything. His ninth regeneration I remember very well, too. One with a fierce defense mechanism when it came to other people, but very little care for himself. He threw himself into the path of danger over and over, and it was only sheer luck that he survived half the time. If Rose hadn't been around, he would have gotten himself seriously injured or killed multiple times in that time. He hated the Daleks with a passion, he was a man of fire and fury and the ability to burn through worlds, but love stopped him, and he regenerated for love.

The Doctor I first met came into the scene, born of a kiss, but weak, and _unable_ to help in the time of need. Of course he came through at the end, he always does, but he was distinctly human, recognizing which social habits are unacceptable in company, dressing smart, trying to impress a girl. He was in love, and he forwent his ability to roam around free throughout time and space because he had found a tether, a lifeline of sorts, and when he lost it, he was devastated. He filled the gaps the only way he knew how, drifting and lonely until he found someone who was willing to connect with him while still mourning for Rose. His emotional negligence drove away Martha, and he found a fantastic friend in Donna, only to lose her as well. The realization occurred, in the end of all things, that everyone he interacted with became a soldier, just like he was, and that knowledge nearly broke him.

Oh, but that was not all, of course not. There was the one glimmer of hope, the Master's return, the I'd-dare-not-have-hoped possibility that there was another Time Lord left, that he hadn't caused the utter devastation of his race, that there was someone who might understand the kind of life he led. And so he allowed it, a year in captivity for the sake of knowing that his once-friend was still alive and well, even if he had to undo the damage, even if he had to use the power of humans (still always humans) to reverse time itself. And he cried when the Master died in his arms, begged him not to go, but as always, he was left behind. So he buried him and ran, only to find that burial hadn't kept him down and even still he tried to reason with him, tried to make him understand that they could lead a life without the perpetual loneliness that plagued him, the constant guilt that might have been alleviated just a little to know that there was someone of his own kind that he may have been able to help, and that disappeared too. And now he was just kind of.. there. Wandering around in the TARDIS, trying to fix everything, but he never could. He could never bring his family back, and he could never bring any of his companions back, so he gave up. He was all alone now.

These were the thoughts circling my amazed and exhausted mind, when the Doctor found me. I had fallen on the ground, laying there, just crying and sobbing and shaking and having a mental break-down of sorts. When he touched me again I screamed in agony, but I knew that he was just trying to calm me down.

"D-do not tou.." I started, but I stopped, gasping for breath because of the crying and the panic.

"Just calm down. It's going to be okay. I took care of the robots. I sent them back, okay? Everything is okay." He started. He was trying to comfort me, and yet he did not know why I was acting this way. I took a couple of deep breaths, and opened my eyes.

"That is not the reason I am panicking," I looked him in the eyes. "You can never touch me, first of all. I have a power.. Or an ability. Ability is a good word. That is what is not right about me. I don't know why I can do this, but I can, and.." I stopped talking. What was I going to say? How would he believe me? He looked at me with anticipation.

"When I touch someone I.. become their physical form, of some sorts. In my head."

"You turned into me?"

"No. I was you. I received your memories, the second we touched. I saw everything you have ever seen, I did everything you have ever done. I know it sounds freaky, bu.. but it's true, I swear.. I was all ten versions of you.." the tears were streaming down my face, and I was still shaking. I had moved. I was sitting on the bed, and the Doctor was in front of me, looking me in the eyes.

"Everything I have ever done? And seen?" He looked at me with concern, and I nodded in response.

"No human brain can withhold that much.. That is why you are like that." He stood up, and started walking around. He had figured out the equation.

"You fainted, I thought you were just scared. But it was because of me.."

"It's not your fault, you didn't know. I just.. I can't leave now. But I need some time.. to get my energy back. I should have put on my gloves.." My voice was lowering, and I closed my eyes again. The pain was getting bearable. I could sort out my thoughts a little.

"You want to come with me?" I heard him ask, sitting next to me.

"Yes. After all I've seen, I feel like I have to.." My eyes were still closed, and the tears were still coming.


End file.
